Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Become a Real Man For Christmas at John K's Amazon Store!

Kirk Douglas can teach you or your wimpy emo cartoonist boyfriend to be a real man.

If you buy Detective Story you will learn everything there is to know about what it is to be a man. Kirk shows you all the opposing forces in every man that pull, tug and tear us apart.

Men keep their ugliest emotions all wrapped up inside. The longer we repress them, the more they boil and try to burst out of our skin. When they finally do explode we say and do the ugliest meanest things. BUT a REAL man knows he did a bad thing when he does and he then experiences the manliest emotion of all....REMORSE.

Nobody has better remorse than Kirk.

Fellas, do something real rotten then experience the bliss of utter, sheer gut poisoning remorse. It's the purest most beautiful emotion we men have!

My main man Marc has started an Amazon store for you where I select all my favorite movies and sort them by type and actor.

The first genre is manly movies. The manliest actors are Kirk Douglas, Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum and Burl Ives. (And my Dad. But he's not acting. He can kick your guts out with his remorse.)

You will see in the store that I picked the best of their movies. When you watch them you will not only feel the irresistible urge to get manlier yourself, you will also see the inspirations of many of my rawest most emotional cartoons.

Make someone manly this Christmas! Let's all have an aggravated, rugged and repressed Yuletide!

Hey, John K. I've been reading your blog since the summer and I must say your blog is probably the best of all my favorite artists (you post a lot more than Jhonen Vasquez, thats for sure). And I was just wondering if you were a fan of the anti-Disney movies of the 70's and 80's, like Fritz the Cat and Heavy Metal and all them. I just stumbled across a Canadian movie from the 80's and I wondered if you had seen it, it's called Rock & Rule and it is amazing. If you haven't already seen it I suggest you scoop up a copy of it, it's probably the best work of Nelvana's that I've seen (and I've seen just about every cartoon they've produced).

and heck, you guys want to learn about composition? watch this movie! and load up on hitchcock! check out how in the first shot, the chick [eleanor parker i believe?] who's leading the conversation is in the foreground and douglas is in the back. he's thinking about what she's saying, visibly subdued by the framing, visibly distanced. Then he realizes it's time for the good ol remorse! next clip the Parker is still totally visible but she's framed entirely by douglas! he's totally in control at this point. She's visible but dwarfed by him, weak and at the bottom of the screen. His body is trying to push her out of the frame more or less which on top of showing his power is showing his current thoughts.

if you can find weekend pussy hunt online you can check out how john used some of these techniques in one of his cartoons.

there's a definite correlation between cinema and animation. don't just watch cartoons to learn how to make cartoons, watch movies too! movies like this where the mis en scen does more than just show people on the screen!

good movies! For Mitchum I've only seen Night of the Hunter. It was sort of remade recently by David Gordon Green in his movie called Undertow. It was interesting but it didn't have the weird suspense that Mitchum carried with him. I'll check out Cape Fear too.

My brother studies computer game design at university, and one of the classes he takes is animation. During dinner he was complaining that he had an exam today and the questions were 'stupid'.

He said, "One question was like 'What is this guy famous for creating- a) Ren and Stimpy b) Beavis and Butthead or c) {something else}.' How was I supposed to know that!" I asked him if the name was John Kricfalusi and he replied "Yeah, something like that. My professor is obsessed with him. Is it b) then? 'Cause I put b)."

I wanted to strangle him! It's enough already that he's a big Family Guy fan. I'm sending him the link to your blog in the hope that he'll learn something, but to be honest he sounds like too much of a lost cause :(

I've always assumed Ren had the body and facial expressions of Kirk D and the slow, calculating close-up acting of Peter Lorre. Add some of the oddest loonie-rant dialogues written and bang, zoom, straight to high-lair-i-tee.

hey John, if you like Kirk Douglas, Check him out in "Lonely are the Brave" (one of HIS personal Favorites), and "lust for life". Also Thanks for introducing me to Raymond Scott. I am now a rabid fan of his music.

Wow, this guy has some Ren! The internal dilemas are just tearing him up!Hey John, I was wondering if you maybe have some helpful pointers or advice for newcomers to the animation freelancing industry. ALso, is there anyway I could get you to criticize my work? I need to know how to get better. Hopefully see you in a few years!

Funnily enough, a teacher friend of mine asked me just last night "why do the boys always cry when you get them into trouble".And i said "Coz guys feel remorse." So true.I'm growing a beard at the moment. I thought it was to emulate the manlyness of Chuck Norris.I realise now that its just a sub-conscious way of hiding the fact that i lack the manly cleft chin of 'The Douglas'.

Hooray I have all these movies.I especially love night of the hunter, out of the past and young man with a horn.Brando's pretty good to at being an angry manly man in streetcar named desire and on the water front.

I like Lee Marvin. In "The Wild One," you keep waiting for him to pick Marlon Brando up and crack him one-fisted like a walnut.

The Duke was pretty tough in real life. Once he punched a guy through a door. And he also stormed down to Frank Sinatra's hotel room, told the Chairman to knock off the racket.

"Nobody talks to Mr. Sinatra like that," a bodyguard snarled.

The Duke turned as if he were about to leave, then backhanded the guy across the face, knocking him to the floor. Then the Duke picked up a chair and smashed it over the guy, knocking him out completely.

End of party.

Sean Connery once took a gun out of Johnny Stompanato's hand. The mafia cat was waving it under Connery's nose and threatening to kill him for messing with Lana Turner.

Kirk is pretty awesome in 'ace in the hole'. Amazing remorse in that film. Also, Ralph Meeker is a pretty great manly man. Especially in films like 'kiss me deadly'. Nothing like seeking Meeker beat the shit out of a cock-eyed thug.

Robert Ryan also does the manly remorse thing to great effect in a supporting role in "The Wild Bunch".

Considering that they were produced roughly concurrently, it's funny how similar the main characters in "Detective Story" and "On Dangerous Ground" are to each other, but Douglas and Ryan are both great in their own manly ways. "On Dangerous Ground" was released much later due to one of the protracted tinkering efforts for which Howard Hughes was infamous at RKO in the 50s.

For modern movie actors, the only one who seems to be able to pull off old school "manly remorse" worth a damn is Gabriel Byrne, but he rarely gets the opportunity. When he does (e.g. "Miller's Crossing") he hits it out of the park.